


saint helena doves and other flightless birds

by Nimravidae



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Established Relationship, M/M, Overuse of Metaphors, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), author is CLEARLY working through something, does it count as second chance at love, falling as a traumatic event, flightless demons, if the first love was God, will i ever stop talking about fucking birds?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 09:40:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19664794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nimravidae/pseuds/Nimravidae
Summary: Love is messy and inconsistent. Six thousand years of repression, trauma, and love come to a head in a cottage in the South Downs.Crowley was convinced, from the moment God reached into him and wrenched her Love from him, that he was undeserving of any inkling of grace. A belief that becomes harder and harder to reconcile with when faced with the limitless, boundless, love of Aziraphale.In the background, the Saint Helena Dove continues to be extinct, stars continue to fall, and demons continue to be unable to fly.[There is now an incrediblePODFIC by the esteemed burnhamofvulcan]





	saint helena doves and other flightless birds

**Author's Note:**

> Do you remember how I said Patron Saint was entirely self-indulgent nonsense? Same energy, but in an opposite direction. 
> 
> Intended to serve as a companion-piece to [the mortifying ordeal of being known](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19416055) but that by no means means you have to read it. All it does is mention Crowley's penchant for attempting to fly knowing damn well he can't. 
> 
> As a quick warning (as mentioned in the tags) while this fic does not contain suicidal idealation, there are a number of scenes in which clearly troubled characters stand at the edges of extremely tall things. If the image/thought bothers you, I strongly discourage you from reading.
> 
> So not only is there a podfic, but burnhamofvulcan also made this _incredible_ [cover art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20113321)

_They saw a cloud of fire fall._  
_Cries of pain, cruel responses,_  
_Mixed together in the flame to the flapping of wings._  
\- Alfred de Vigny, _Eloa or the Sister of the Angels_

When you have spent your entire existence flying, there are no words to describe what it feels like to fall. 

The gut-ripping panic as your wings spread out behind you—appendages you had known since you first sprouted from nothing, as loyal and undying as your own Essence, your Light, your life—unable to catch the wind to slow the rapid descent into nothingness. No matter how hard you tried, how much you strained and beat them they never caught the air again. Your body twisting and wrenching under the immaculate pressure you never even noticed before. Whipping winds tearing at your flesh, renting feathers from your wings and the faster you fell the harder you fought, every inch straining and stretching as you realized you are well and truly fucked.

For the time it takes to hit the ground, the panic outweighed the pain. For every moment after, it didn’t.

There were ways to recreate flying, no one entirely successful. Crowley would know, he’d tried them all. Rolling down the windows to his Bentley and pushing the accelerator to its absolute limits, standing on the edge of buildings, standing at the edge of ponds and lakes and letting the cool breeze filter through his hair. Nothing ever matched up.

The closest Crowley ever got was the end of the world; standing on the precipice of oblivion, watching the Earth crumble and split and feeling effortlessly weightless with the knowledge that he was going to die. 

The stomach-dropping, breath-stealing sensation of flying swept him up and landed him back on his feet the moment the end of the world stopped and the rest of the days on Earth began. 

The second closest he ever got was nearly a year after, standing on the cliff just a short, brisk, walk from a cottage in the South Downs that sprung from nothing but twin-conflicting powers of angelic and infernal grace. Nestled perfectly up where gardens could bloom inexplicably year-round, surrounded by towering trees. Near enough the beach that if he listened close enough, he could hear the crashing of waves and the whoosh of the tidal pull back out. Far enough that if he wanted some quiet, a few stolen moments without the over-present hum of Angelic Grace from the next room, he could wander up to the edge of the cliff side, standing on the very edge of oblivion and think. 

As close as he could get to that moment he spent staring down Satan himself. The last moment he really felt he could fly. 

Close enough to people that Aziraphale and he could make regular trips to shops and he could find refuge in some meandering little hobbies that wasn’t torturing his gardens (Aziraphale frowned on that, so Crowley had to do it in solitude. Which is much preferable for him as well. He never did like an audience for his menacing. At least not a non-photosynthesizing audience). Far enough that when his corporeal form shuddered out his wings, he wasn’t bothering anyone. They stretched, feeling the cool breeze rolling on off the water as sulfuric-stained eyes turned up towards the skies. 

There were certain things Crowley acclimated to. The pain, the coldness—everything that constantly churned under his skin and ate him from the inside out—he befriended. It was simpler, easier, than constantly fighting it, swallowing it down again and again and locking it away the way other demons tried after their Fall. 

They wouldn’t let themselves feel it, express it. They dug their teeth into each other flesh instead, ripping and tearing at limbs that shattered on impact, skin peeled away by sulfuric gasses and the razor-whip of the wind that betrayed them. 

In its current rendition, Hell gives no space to think, to breathe. The claustrophobic press of bodies and walls and horrors nip and howl from every direction; they chew at your heels and settle—curled like sleeping dogs—in the back of your mind. The pain never left them, it never abandoned them. The constant sear of burning flesh, the places where She reached inside them and tore Herself out, leaving them open and bleeding and raw and empty.

She took back everything She gave them, turned them inside out and sent the others, Her lackies, their brothers and sisters and siblings, to drive them from their home. Flaming swords at the ready, pressed against throats as they were driven like cattle over the edge. One by one, tumbling through the cracked floors of Heaven. 

She took everything, left them bleeding and drowning in Hellfire. 

That was a lie (Crowley _is_ a demon, you can’t blame him it's sort of what he does)  
  
She didn’t take everything. She left them their wings but stole the air from their lungs, stole the world beneath their feet and the feeling of wind rushing through their feathers. Crowley never knew why she did it, why she didn’t tear them apart joint-by-joint, why she chose to leave them swathed in their own useless appendages. Why she chose to leave them with the mangled, perverted reminders of what they used to be. 

He never meant to Fall, he never meant to hurt Her but She invented pain and gave it to them. A parting gift before she sent him and all the rest hurtling towards the ground, sealing their eyes shut and drowning them like unwanted pets, as if it wasn’t Her fault to begin with. She _made_ him this way. 

The anger could have lingered, it could have rotted. That was all Hell was, after all, anger. It was the festering wrath and rage against God, a frothing need for vengeance and vindication. To settle into it, to be apart of it, meant ignoring the aching settled between the sternum and the spine. A method of avoidance, sealing tight the echoes of millennia-old trauma until it broke through, reborn into cruelty. 

Crowley liked to say he wasn’t angry anymore. He got used to it. He Fell, what of it?

(Hung around the wrong sort, sauntered vaguely, whatever, you know. He could only saunter so far before reaching the edge. Before he was clambering backwards away from a flaming sword, pleading with the brother above him. Down was down. Falling was Falling. Landing was, well. Didn’t matter if you sauntered, if you Fell, or if you swan dove. Landing was landing. And no demon ever landed soft.)

He was over it. Got used to it. He found refuge in the frozen wasteland; found home in the emptiness of himself. 

At least for a while. Snakes lack wings, teeth, claws, the capacity to scream until their throats shed. So he took that, cold blooded matched the cold skin the cold self the cold everything. Rocks burned his underbelly in a sweet-fire sting, reminiscent of standing too close to the burning stars he used to meld together to make galaxies. 

(It was funny, he’d never seen one fall, streaking across the sky, leaving a blink of fire in its wake, until he did.) 

Then he met an angel, a warm glow and a burning smile and blazing-white wings that wrenched him out of his shape and forced him to stumble back onto two feet, in a form new and foreign but far more appealing than anything else he’d been in a long while. Then he stopped the apocalypse. 

And somewhere in between he fell in love.

Nasty thing, falling in love. 

Crowley wouldn’t personally recommend it. Just like he personally wouldn’t recommend free-falling through oblivion, clinging to any sort of desperate hope that if you just try hard enough, you’ll catch yourself. He fell in love with an angel, with someone who still had all his wings, all his feathers, all his brilliant and full-headed thoughts of Heaven and Her (maybe less, after they saved the world, after everything came apart under their fingers and joined Lot’s wife as sediment in a hot breeze)

There on the cliff side, he toed the line of the grass, stepping immeasurably closer as his wings shuddered under a stiff wind. Across the sky, and the pitch-ink of the ocean, smears of black tumbled and dove, their distant calls to one another lost in the writhing water beneath them. 

Hard to see with eyes not made for staring, un-blinking, into the rich blanket of night.

Crowley filled the lungs he didn’t need and kept looking up. A flex, a tendril of power that matched the darkness of the night seeped into the air around him, twisting up and up, infinitely far. 

Meteorologists had been scrambling to explain the sudden increase of meteor showers since Crowley agreed to move with Aziraphale. Since he methodically packed up all his art and found homes for them inside a new place far from the city-bustle of London. He flexed the hollowed out part of him that once made the stars and watched as another one of his creations tumbled, burning infinitely, into nothing. 

When it was just him blindly in love with an angel who gave his sword away, it wasn’t so bad. He’d stare, ache, burn with a sort of fire that almost reminded him of the rocks under his belly in Eden and the sand beneath his scales. The want suffocated, the need drove him insane. But pain was the sort of thing a demon got used to, constant companion, lurking just under the surface. Crowley learned to keep it tucked under his arm, close by and ever in his sight. 

And yet, all of that was so much simpler than any moment after Aziraphale had kissed him.

You came apart too much, under love, he found. 

Once it’s reciprocated. 

It was another person, another entity, that existed. For the longest time (six thousand years, to be exact) he thought love was just a never-ending needling of pain under his skin, centering around the empty void in his chest where Light and Love used to mingle and co-exist, spilling out through his veins and twisting their respective feelings over one another. Love, he thought, was just another one of those various pains he’d have to get acclimated to. Like the other aches and ghosts and phantom pains in every bit of his body.

Both physically manifest and existentially expansive. 

Falling in love with someone who, against all reason and odds, loved him back felt an awful lot like the moments right before God turned her back on him. Where he knew he was lost and abandoned but he wasn’t quite hopeless yet. He could still cradle the fledgling ember of Light inside himself, blow on it to stoke it to a proper burn. 

Before She took it away, She flayed him open, She saw every inch of him, She _was_ every inch of him. She was his Heart his Spirit his Soul his Love. She looked into every thing he’d ever hidden, everything he ever wanted, everything he ever needed, everything he ever asked, took weight of all the wrongs he’d done and all the rights. 

She saw the worst of him, for certain. But She always had, She made his faults the same way She made his failures and his triumphs. He couldn’t blame Her for hating all the things he’d done wrong, for hating all the ways he’d hurt Her without realizing. 

Love was a lot like Falling. She looked inside him, tore him open, she held his Essence in Her hands and saw everything he had ever done, everything he’d ever Loved. She saw his past and his present and his future, saw the ways he’d save the humans She loved so much, saw the way he could Love them, could Love Aziraphale, could just _love._ She saw it all and decided it wasn’t enough. 

He moved until he was at the impossible ledge, the scent of a summer storm rolling in mingling in with a distant siren call of salt and fresh air. His arms spread with his wings, one foot moving out over nothingness. 

In the early, early, days of the 16th-Century, Crowley had gone to Brazil, visiting a few islands here and there. He found one of particular interest. Not because of the people, or the things, or the foods, but because of the birds. _Dysmoropelia dekarchiskos._

“Crowley!” 

Saint Helena Doves. 

“Good Lord, what do you think you’re doing?” The snipped, worry-laced angry huff was accompanied by the flapping of a jacket in the wind and the quickened footsteps over grass. “You could fall!” 

Crowley landed his foot back on the solid ground, wings lowering to twitch, angrily wired and coiled with the anticipation of flying. “I’ve already done that, angel.” 

He didn’t mean for the smattering of guilt to twist across Aziraphale’s expression, but it came anyway. Mixed with a sort of wrathful twinge of annoyed and misplaced anger. “That’s not what I—I _know_ that! Get back from there before you get yourself killed.” A beat, a frustrated huff. “Or discorperated which, if it lands you back in Hell good luck getting a new body!” 

They were notoriously stingy with those. And they weren’t exactly fond of Crowley at the moment. Glancing down over the edge, watching the sand swift and twist with vertigo beneath him, Crowley debated standing there for a few more moments, getting another breeze through his hair. 

But Aziraphale made a few more distressed sounds and Crowley acquiesced, stepping back. “I wasn’t going to _jump,_ angel,”

“Could have fooled me! Standing out there like that. I can’t even imagine what you were _actually_ doing.”

He slid his hands into his pockets, turning neatly on a heel. He poked his tongue into his cheek, rolling the truth around to decide if he liked the taste. 

In six thousand and four years he’d never actually lied to Aziraphale. He’d come close once or twice, misrepresented the truth, but he never outright lied. Today didn’t appear to be the day either. He settled somewhere in between the two. “Watching the stars.” 

His eyes were closed, didn’t mean he couldn’t see them. He put all of them there, he remembered every single one. He knew where they were, he knew them each individually. Like his plants, or like the freckles and spots on Aziraphale’s skin. 

Aziraphale turned his face up to the sky, nose scrunching as he contemplated the stars for a moment or two. “Well. Don’t frighten me like that again.” He turned back to face Crowley, “It’s a nice night.” 

Another breeze cut through the soggy late-summer heat. “It is,” he agreed, looking back out, wingtips twitching to spread. There had been a period of time that he used to go out each night, clamber up to the roof of the cottage and take a running leap, bounding from treetop to treetop, half-in, half-out of his True Form and his Corporeal Form. Frightened the neighbors apparently. 

Didn’t stop him, just made him a bit more careful about where he did it. “The neighbors are out enjoying it,” Aziraphale pointed out, tilting his head towards the beach. In the distance, two tiny specks that only they could hear. The swish of feet skating over sand, the low hum of voices, a distant thrum of excited heart-beats. “You ought to head inside.”

Him? He frowned a bit at the specification, sniffing and looking down at himself. Oh, maybe him. He wasn’t so much on two feet as he was on scaled hooves, wings still shivering and clawed fingers threatening to shred the inside of his pockets. If he touched his head, he was fairly certain he’d find all three sets of horns he’s got. 

He cracked his neck and snapped back to sorts. “I was distracted,” he said, by way of explanation. Across from him, Aziraphale smiled his benign, infuriatingly understanding smile. 

“Probably best we don’t interrupt,” Aziraphale said, eyes flickering back towards the couple. “I could sense a bit of, eh, Love, rolling off them.”

“What sort?” 

“Not the sordid sort,” Aziraphale explained, that soft, warm look filling his eyes as he looks down where the specks became bigger. Full-on dots by that point. “It’d be rude to watch over, either way.” 

Crowley followed Aziraphale’s eye line. He couldn’t feel anything rolling off them. Not that he’d be surprised. He was terrible at feeling the flashes of Love that Aziraphale felt. He wasn’t attuned to it anymore. Like his barometer had been torn out, wires all crossed. “Guess so. Let’s head back.”

They walked instead of blinking in and out of space, but in general quiet either way. Occasionally, Aziraphale would mutter something about the wind or the pollen, or the heat. Occasionally Crowley would sniff, shift his hands in his jacket pockets. 

“You eat, angel?” He asked, because the silence was getting a bit oppressive and all Crowley could think about was the doves on an island not far from the coast of Brazil. Their eyes filled with questions about the man sprawled out in the low grass staring at them. 

Aziraphale started, clearly not anticipating conversation. “I did, I hope you don’t mind I didn’t wait for you. It’s not as though you care to partake that much, dear boy.” A beat, where Crowley could glance over, wishing for another moment he had picked a pair of sunglasses up when he left. “I left a plate, if you did, though.”

He didn’t, actually. At least not really. He more liked watching Aziraphale eat, watching him sink into the comfort of human enjoyments, listening to the low, soft noises that rolled through him with every bite. Watching the way his eyes slid shut and his whole body wriggled and bopped to the flavor of whatever it was he was so thoroughly enjoying. 

It’s unique, really, to watch happiness take hold of someone so thoroughly, to enrapture them entirely. It was the same idea that drove Crowley to really, thoroughly, enjoy pleasing his angel late at night. “I could think of some other things I’d rather do tonight,” he offered, sparing a glance at Aziraphale, brow raised. 

Beside him, in the fever-pitch darkness, Aziraphale flushed, a dark red. “If you’re so inclined.” His shoulders wiggled, a sign that Aziraphale was certainly inclined. If Crowley was, of course. Ever the coy one, the faux-demure and coquettish. 

“I certainly am.”

They didn’t skip right to the bedroom, a flurry of hands and flesh and feathers. Aziraphale opened the door for Crowley, made tea, read aloud a few chapters of whatever it was he was reading as Crowley tended to one of their few indoor plants (ones Aziraphale chose, ones Crowley trained for him and him alone. If Aziraphale fancied them, he could be nice to them. Crowley just misted them.) 

Might’ve been poetry, given all the energy and affection Aziraphale pushed into each breath. 

It wasn’t until much later that they went to bed, Crowley dragging lips and teeth and tongue across Aziraphale’s body to make him reply all his favorite sounds. It was absolutely amongst one of Crowley’s favorite things. Watching him come apart under the relentless waves of pleasure again and again, until his corporeal form shuttered and split, exposing the blazing-burn of Light and Love beneath the surface. The only true form of completion: exposure and consumption. 

Crowley used to pull back when that happened, when Aziraphale’s physical body flittered out as the fires of his Essence began to consume him. Now he pushed forward, slithering up his body to taste the raw power of Heaven on his tongue, to feel the holy-burn of Light curling up his cheekbones, carding through his hair as he reached in and _touched_ him. 

Touched him where no one but Her ever had. 

Made Aziraphale his, _his,_ alone. If only for a moment. 

To say that doing so was dangerous would be an underestimation. She wasn’t exactly known for sharing. Plus Crowley ran cold. It didn’t have the same impact as Aziraphale reaching into him, pushing his Love into his crevices. Crowley’s touches, his drag of his essence down over Aziraphale’s, tended to feel more like a cutting winter, an ice-storm assailing your home and snuffing out your fire. Like being so cold you burn. 

He felt like frostbite, nipping at Aziraphale’s Love. Not that the angel ever complained. He clung to Crowley afterwards, whispering how good it felt to have him like that, to feel him shuddering and hanging stars inside him. Making Aziraphale understand the galaxies. 

Not that Crowley understood how _that_ worked. He probably just felt cold. Empty inside the angel’s Essence.  
  
They laid there, together, lazily slipping between and blurring the lines for Ethereal and Corporeal. Wings there and gone, eyes there and gone, fire there and gone, scales there and gone. Crowley latched around him, touching as much of Aziraphale as he could, watching him breathe in unnecessary breaths, his eyes a low-beaming white. 

“Extraordinary,” he hummed, turning his pointed gaze down. “Really, Crowley.” 

Crowley grunted in response, rolling further on top of him, until his chest was sprawled diagonally over Aziraphale’s. “S’alright.” 

A warm hand settled low on his back. “Really, I don’t know where you learned to do things like that, and I don’t think I wish to know. I’ll just keep,” the hand raised, waved, and dropped back again. “Reaping the rewards, I suppose.” 

Crowley buried his nose against his sternum, breathing in the ghost of ozone and close-cut grass of buzzing Celestial energies. And cologne, of course. For some reason, he still couldn’t stop thinking about those damned doves and all the stars clinging to their hopes in the skies.

As opposed to taking his silence as a sign of a roiling and upset mind, Aziraphale patted Crowley’s back again. “Are you planning on sleeping, dear boy?” 

“Not really.” He turned his face back up, replacing his nose with his chin to watch Aziraphale carefully. “I was going to head up to the roof.” 

He could feel the tension building and the thick lines of muscle in Aziraphale's body going taut all at once. Maybe he really did spook him out on the cliff. Aziraphale’s hand grew heavier, pressing down hard against bare skin. The glows had all faded, leaving them awash in the cold-cast of the moon. Crowley shivered, an involuntary motion in the stifling summer-sex-heat of the bedroom. 

“Any particular reason?”

Crowley pushed himself upright, carefully detangling from the grip. 

The thing about six thousand years of loving someone who he thought could never love him back, who he was _certain_ could never love him back—is that the both of them got very, very good at not discussing things. No need for _thank you_ or _you’re welcome_ or _well that seems like such a strange thing for you to do for me, any particular reason you felt the need to run, burning, into a church to save me from having to do paperwork?_

Discussing it made it real and making it real made it known and making it known made it...real. Too real. Crowley was fine with it was real in the sense that stars were real, distant and cold and there—he wasn’t find with things being real in the sense that a star burning up in your hands was real. 

Six thousand years and he hadn’t ever lied to Aziraphale. “Not really. Just a nice night, isn’t it? Good clear one, too. Good for watching the stars.” Tiny ones didn’t count. No, he didn’t know where the biscuits ran off too, of course he absolutely hosed out the rubbish bin, didn’t just miracle it. Of course you can tell the difference, which is why he absolutely did it by hand. He certainly _did_ enjoy the music at the restaurant, wasn’t at all a screeching nightmare entirely out of sync with Crowley’s tastes. 

Why no, Aziraphale, he wasn’t going to go up to the roof to fling himself off a few dozen times to see if he remembered what it felt like to fly. 

Crowley dressed in a snap, trying not to look back where Aziraphale tangled in the sheets, overflowing eyes blinking at him from the darkness—two distinct pinpoints of light in a sea of washed out darkness. “Promise, won’t be gone long.” 

“Alright,” Aziraphale said, voice careful and steady. “I’ll be here.” 

It wasn’t difficult to get up on the roof, but as soon as the humid wind rustled through Crowley’s feathers once more, his eyes drew up.

And once again the stars reminded him of birds. 

Saint Helena Doves. He'd seen a few when he visited the island back around 1502; little things hopping about, grey-white feathers ruffling with trepidation as he plodded forward, incorrigibly loud in comparison to their whisper-quiet steps. 

He dropped to his stomach, hands in the fresh-fallen leaves as he watched them, low to the ground. If there hadn't been other people there, he would've sunk lower, lower, all the way to his snake form. Somewhere safe and hidden beneath the cluttered ground. He watched with protected, unblinking, eyes as the birds prodded at the ground, calling to one another. 

Not a single one took to the skies, not a single one flew. 

Flightless doves. If you could imagine such a thing. Crowley took a few steps backwards, his heels bumping against the chimney stack. A running start to leap from the roof, claws grappling for purchase against the tree, wings raised and ready to take hold of the wind, the air rushing beneath him. 

Flightless doves. He was distracted. Foolishly and stupidly distracted. His heel hit a slick tile and ruined the jump. He missed. He fell.

No demon has ever landed soft. For a moment, lying face-down beside the cottage in the South Downs, grunting as he carefully repaired the broken ribs, the broken nose, he blinked and swore he saw one of those little grey-white birds, head cocking at him as if asking _what do you think you're trying to do?_

 _Fly_. He thought to himself. 

A few years prior--before he decided to Heaven and Hell with regrets, after he thought he'd lost Aziraphale for good, after he got him back despite all odds and elected to be certain he'd said his piece--Aziraphale probably hadn't meant to hurt him on the bandstand. _I won't be forgiven._

_You were an angel once._

Of course he was. 

He pushed himself up on his hands, not yet getting to his feet but at least sitting upright. It's not the sort of thing you forget. The pain echoed from where his vessel had broken, shattered, under the weight of the fall. 

There were nights, quiet nights, where Aziraphale was reading in the sitting room under a lamp harvested from the bookshop in Soho and Crowley was puttering about with another hobby he'd quickly abandon, where Crowley wondered why Aziraphale even bothered to say that. _May you be forgiven._ Crowley can never be forgiven. 

If She would forgive him, She would've done it by now. She would've done it before he Fell. If he was forgivable, he never would've Fallen. 

There was a moment that Crowley remembered sitting there in the mud and the pool of self-loathing he'd concocted for himself. A moment where he wondered if Aziraphale didn't really love him. He'd made Crowley feel his love once, broken them down to their True Forms and clung to Crowley, letting him absorb the Love and Light that seeped from his Essence until it invaded every inch of his ice-swept void. Until Crowley almost felt whole again. 

He shuddered at the memory, marrying the pleasant with the unpleasant. He loved it, he loved every moment of it and he hated that he craved it still. 

The what if curled like smoke around his mind, curiously nudging itself into the deepest recesses and scarred-over wounds where Love used to grow like tumors. _What if he doesn't really love you. What if he only loves the idea of you._

A demon who could be saved. A demon who could Rise again, be redeemed. _You were an angel once._

His head hurt. His body hurt. And when he closed his eyes, he still saw the long-dead dove, staring at him, asking him questions with those beady-blank eyes. Round the back of the house, a ladder leaned against the wall, Crowley grunted himself up to his feet and meandered back over to it. 

_Fucking dove,_ he thought to himself, hand flexing on the cool metal of the ladder. _If you're so smart, why did you go extinct?_

Crowley took his place at his starting line again, wings stretching out and flexing—catching another breeze and shivering under the memory of swooping and diving in Heaven, of chasing himself as he pushed for new heights, new speeds, new everything. 

Right. Crowley knew why they went extinct. Flightless birds were so much easier to hunt. The first time he visited, he’d gotten a close look. 

(He sprinted off again, bounding from the edge with enough momentum this time to carry him through to a topmost branch of the nearest tree, wings arching overhead and beating in the wind. His chest throbbed and his lips parted with a sweet sigh.)

The doves were gorgeous little things. Fascinating. For a couple years, he thought about collecting one, imbuing it with power to stay alive, stay with him. 

(Another leap, kicked off the trunk onto another tree. Then another, leaping and straining and reaching and very, _very,_ nearly flying between them)

He fantasized about it for a bit, about becoming the sort of person who kept birds. Creatures the wind refused to carry, beautiful and majestic nonetheless. (The burn in his muscles was sweet, like an ache of being well-loved, well-used, well-right again.) Something he could find a bit of himself in, admittedly. Broken-winged birds grounded by God, cold eyes turned up to the sky as if pleading meant anything. 

(He reached for another, digging his heels into the bark to push himself off again) 

When he went back, his mind alight with memories of the doves, all he found were rotting corpses. The stench of dead things littered their nests, blood, feathers, rot. Hunted to extinction, nothing left of the Saint Helena dove but open graves and Crowley’s dropped-out stomach. 

In the tree, he missed again. 

This time he landed on his back.

The stars above him swirled and twisted, blinking back down as the dove from his last fall swam before his eyes. _Stop that,_ it told him. The stars agreed, one blinking and streaking through the air. A frown curled itself over Crowley’s lips as pain radiated out from the impact zone. He didn’t mean to do that one. 

_You can’t fly._ They reminded him, the star tumbling down in a flurry of fire and fear and panic and distress. _Not anymore._

Thanks for the reminder. The sharp sting of falling the equivalent of two stories was fundamentally different from the sort of wrenching pain that Crowley experienced on a more day-to-day basis. Though, that’s not to say that one did not intensify the other. Pain was pain, no matter where it was localized, no matter how he felt it, no matter what caused it. This pain, the fresh new burst of bruises and broken bones (melding together with each slow blink of toxic-waste eyes) a symptom of the half-numbed pinpricks of nothingness that swept around him. 

He’s too hollow to fly, too hollow to love properly. He broke what he touched. He couldn’t love his plants without torturing them, without making them fear him and hate him and scorn him. He couldn’t love the stars without reaching up to them, plucking them down one by one to make them feel his pain. 

He couldn't love humans without being the harbinger of their apocalypse.

He couldn’t love the doves on the island without watching them die. 

He couldn’t love Aziraphale without making him cold. 

His wings twitched, leaving broken, crooked feathers clinging to the leaves. Maybe Hell was right about demons and Love. She wrenched that part away from them, when She dug in and burst them apart at the seams and threw them back together with all the force of Her merciless rage She never put Love back. She made them and She unmade them. 

She broke them down to nothing and refused to rebuild them, left them as sand and dust and used the incomprensible pressure of falling and Hell to mold them back as something completely different. She made them and She unmade them. She never gave them back their ability to Love without hurting, the same way She never gave those doves a fucking chance. 

They died, stuck on an island they couldn’t escape, wings beating fruitlessly as foreign invaders to the soil stomped them out. Flightless. They weren’t prepared, they weren’t ready. They had no idea what was coming, just that one day they couldn’t fly and there were things, huge and loud and terrifying coming after them. 

And they couldn’t _fly._

The stars above him blurred, each of them becoming fuzzy pinpricks of light. Distant and cold and too far away. A weak hand raised, fingertips brushing their image but never coming close to their warmth again. He wondered, for a moment, if they were lonely up there. Frozen in the wasteland abyss of space, no one to meander through them, checking in on them. No one to tell them they’ve been growing along nicely, no one to reassure the collapsing stars that soon, soon they’ll become something beautiful. Something more than they ever thought possible. 

Something extraordinary and spectacular. 

His eyes squeeze shut and his teeth grit as another star falls, his hand thunking back against the ground. His fingers gripped the leaves and grass and dirt, tearing it from its roots as he forced himself up and over onto his knees. His wings draped, limp and throbbing and rage bubbled and burst through him. 

At what? He wasn’t sure, but his claws—proper claws, proper ragged, jagged, things—scored through the Earth, sending chunks and dirt and plant matter and leaves careening into the air. Fuck them, fuck the stars, fuck the God-damned birds, and fuck him. 

Just fuck him. 

A pointless exercise in vanity and futility, jumping around trees and standing at the edge of cliffs. Pretending like he could feel what it used to feel like, chase the red-hot burn of Love that Aziraphale coiled through him. Do both at once and maybe he’ll feel like he did before. Fuck him, fuck Aziraphale, fuck Her. 

Fuck Her. 

His wings snapped out as he reared back, snarling up at the emptying skies. Birds hovered and dove and chased their late-night dinners, stars shone down at him, the moon pointedly ignoring. _Fuck you._ For all of it. For him and the birds and the children She drowned in the flood and the boy She had bound to an alter, fathers knife ready to cut his life away. Fuck Her for Sodom, fuck Her for Gomorrah, for all of it. For Adam, for Aziraphale, for Gabriel, for Warlock, for the families She abused and tore apart.

For the birds on the island, for the stars She let burn out. 

He searched the empty Heaven’s, teeth bared and tongue sharp and ready. 

“ _Well?”_ He hissed, arms spread out, daring Her, _daring Her,_ to finish what She started. “What do you have to say?” 

Only the wind howled in response, leaving Crowley alone there, screaming at nothing. Like a tit. 

He grunted up to his feet, shaking out his wings—now filled with leaves and twigs. He could deal with that later. 

While color clearly played an important role in distinguishing demon wings from angel wings (the abject darkness, the light-void of demon wings was beyond just _black._ It was lightless. Entirely.), the chief difference was in the amount of grooming that went into them. Crowley tended to keep his well-ordered, carefully presented. Angels gave it less thought. Vanity was frowned upon for angels. It was frowned upon for demons too, but for entirely different reasons. 

Didn’t stop Crowley from compulsively fixing his, from spending hours wrapping one around himself and picking at loose feathers and skin spots and curious little particles that he accidentally swept up. From grooming for hours until he was immaculately glossy. 

As he walked back to the cottage, his feathers dragged across the filthy ground. 

He just really didn’t have it in him to care at the moment. The light burning from the window suggested that Aziraphale was in the library, curled up with a book like he did most evenings. Meant the bedroom was empty, and Crowley could sprawl over and claim the entire bed for himself. Pour himself into it miserably and sulk for a good few hours. 

But of course he wasn’t allowed to have that. No, the second the door slammed behind him, Aziraphale appeared in the doorway to their little library, eyes wide and worried. “Crowley!” He gasped, for the second time that night. “What in God’s name happened to you?”

God’s name. Cute. He had a whole host of things he could say, things he could shout, things he could scream. But all of them just sort of fall dead on the back of his tongue, rotting there like stars and doves. “Missed a tree,” he said, giving a weak shake of his wings. “Fell.” 

Fell. He fell, that’s what happened to him. He asked too many questions and he Fell and he Fell and that’s why he’s like this. God tore out everything inside him and left him empty because She didn’t love him anymore and if he couldn’t love Her, then he couldn’t love anything. 

Aziraphale’s face softened, and his lower lip sucked into his mouth as he contemplated. “Well,” he said, straightening his waistcoat (why he re-dressed so fully just to putter about the library made no sense to Crowley, but he stopped asking questions. Look where those got him). “Go on then,” he gestured to the floor. 

Crowley arched a brow, glancing down. “What?”

“Lie down, your wings are full of...debris.” 

Oh, oh this was good. Crowley looked back over his shoulders, the normally oil-slick sheening wings were dull, lifeless, and—well full of debris from his tumble into the woods. He’s fairly certain he can feel a spider in there. Horrifying. “Are you going to groom me?” 

“Well you’re not trekking them over these clean floors, are you?” 

Crowley looked further back, in the few steps from the door to where he stood, he’d absolutely left a trail.

Lost a few feathers, leaves. A stick. 

He frowned and sighed, snatching a pillow from the couch and carefully lowering himself down onto the ground, wings spread and cheek resting on the silk. “Don’t muck them up,” he told him, stretching his wings out, feeling horrifyingly exposed. 

Bare. 

He shuddered and twitched at the first half-hovering hand that brushed across his feathers, recoiling back just a touch. They don’t do this, they’ve never done really done this. There had been idle pets, gentle carding fingers through feathers, kisses to the upper ridge of their wings. But they’ve never really groomed one another. Aziraphale _didn’t_ groom himself, so Crowley wasn’t about to go about asking for him to reach a few bent feathers. 

“It’s alright, I won’t—I know _how_ to groom wings,” Aziraphale huffed, but lifted his hand as Crowley twitched away from the touch again. “Really, Crowley?”

His eyes squeezed shut, tight enough to see little bursts of light and the hidden galaxies he never got to make. “It’s not you,” now that’s a lie. A proper one. Six thousand-odd years was a good streak though. Had to have been broken sometime. “I landed on my back.” 

“Oh. I’ll be gentle.” It took everything Crowley had not to twitch and recoil again at fingers straightening his feathers. Angel hands, touching him, feeling him, picking leaves and blades of grass from between his feathers. 

His breath came harsh, out through his nose. It didn’t matter, anyone touching his wings—he tried to tell himself that. It wouldn’t ever matter. They were useless, clunky appendages that didn’t work anymore. Nothing but burdens, nothing but liabilities (nothing to catch him, nothing to save him anymore. All he could do was imagine himself, remember himself furiously trying to catch wind, trying to fly as his body was twisted by the force of his Fall. The wind betraying him, the air betraying him, his wings betraying him.) Aziraphale picked a stick out from near the joint and the whole wing snapped closer, wrenching away. 

Aziraphale, who had sat beside him, colorless void stretched over his lap, sharply recoiled. “Oh, my dear! I’m sorry, did I hurt you?” 

Yes, yes, yes. “No.” Slowly, Crowley uncoils the protesting muscles. “Grooming isn’t...demons don’t…” Groom each other. Demons never touched each others wings, they tried to keep them folded away, hidden as much as they could to avoid it. No one ever talked about it but the reasons were rather obvious. “Not used to it.” 

“Oh, right,” Aziraphale hovered a hand. “Of course. Angel’s don’t...well, you know.” 

He did. “Just get on with it, angel.” 

And he did. Aziraphale was quick, to the point, freeing all the bits and pieces of nature that squirreled away inside his wings, found the spider and took the poor thing outside. All was said and done within half an hour, but Crowley didn’t put his wings away, didn’t push himself up and go right to bed. 

Instead he laid there, staring at a bit of dust on the floor. “I Fell,” he told the dust—blinking a few times where it turned into a dove and a star and back into dust again. 

“You said,” Aziraphale replied, resting a hand between the joints that bind his wings to his back. “From the tree, I presume. You’d be far more damaged if you went back to—”

“Not what I meant.” His voice was hoarse. Rough. 

Not at all what he meant. Not at all what he wanted. Aziraphale didn’t breathe behind him. They never _needed_ to breathe, but it was a comforting gesture nonetheless. The steady in and out of puffing breaths, the quiet reminder that someone else is there, watching you, watching over you. But now Aziraphale wasn’t breathing, his hand was a warm, pulsating weight there between his shoulderblades, echoing the heat and Light that Crowley lost so, so long ago. 

The quiet reigned, in the distance, a bird shrieked. 

It was so still, so quiet, that Crowley could hear the parting of Aziraphale’s lips as he readied himself to speak. “I know, dear boy. I know.” The hand rubbed, slow and tight lines between his wings. “You’ve been upset these few weeks and I don’t—I’m not sure how to help you.” 

“You can’t.” 

“I want to try.” Nails cling to Crowley’s shirt, which shimmers in and out of existence alongside his scaled back, occasionally leaving Aziraphale scratching at the twitching edges of Crowley’s Essence. “I love you, Crowley, this is what we do for the people we love.” 

Love. Love. Love. It echoed and hit and rung and Crowley’s back arched, pushing Aziraphale’s touch off him. “You love me,” he said, wrenching himself up so he was sitting, looking at those shock-wide eyes. “Aziraphale you—how? How can you love me? I’m,” he held out his hands, the scales, the claws, the dark mottled spots that came the more upset he got. “I _can’t_ be loved, can I?” 

Can’t be forgiven, can’t be loved. 

Blue eyes overflow with emotions that Crowley couldn’t even look at. He fixated down on his hands instead, on the mangled, burned claws. He could feel the righteous power of Aziraphale puffing himself for some grand speech about the power of Love and that he loved Crowley so much and that should be enough. 

So he cut him off, right at the start. “Think about it, Aziraphale. She doesn’t love me—”

“ _She—”_

“No, no,” He held up a hand, scooting backwards and scrambling up to his feet. “I know She doesn’t love me, Aziraphale, I know She doesn’t. She—She reached inside me, as I Fell. She reached inside all of us and She _tore_ Her love out. She ripped it out of us, she ripped it out of—” Me. 

He was going to say _me_ there but his voice wouldn’t come. It cracked and his True Form shivered around his corporeal form, not enough to stay, but enough to flash the broken creature he’d become. Burned scales and thin-lined scars where his eyes used to peer all around Heaven. Three sets of horns circling his head like a bastardized form of a halo—the bone-stumps where the eyed wings of his crown used to be. 

It flashed there, and it was gone again and there, in parts, and gone again—until Crowley could grapple himself back down to be in just his corporeal form, wings tucked away where no one could see them drag. “I keep thinking about these doves,” he said.

Aziraphale blinked, once, then twice, then a third time. His mouth opened, his lips pursed. Then he shook his head. “Did you say doves?”

“ _Yes,”_ Crowley insisted, wrapping his arms around himself. “These—these doves on this island by Brazil. Saint Helena, I visited once and they were...they were flightless doves! Looked like proper doves but they couldn’t fly. I don’t know why but I couldn’t stop thinking about them, thought they were fascinating. I came back and they were gone.”

The blinking angel stared up at him from the floor. “Gone?” 

“Gone. Hunted to extinction. Buggers never stood a chance.” 

Flightless doves. Grounded innocence didn’t have a chance in Hell. Let alone in Hell. 

“Could we go back to what we were discussing before?” Aziraphale stood with a bit of effort, straightening his clothes. “What was this about love?” 

“The doves just—Aziraphale they were _there_ and I thought.. _._ I laid on that island for hours to watch them, I got seeds to feed them, I just...I wanted to stay but I was part of some mission at the time and, honestly, they were just...doves that couldn’t fly. A whole lot of them and now they’re gone, like they never existed.” 

“Crowley.” Aziraphale didn’t sound pleased. Then again, he rarely sounded pleased with Crowley at the current moment. Or past moments. 

But Crowley soldiered on, his rant animating him—he waved his hands, paced the length of the room as he snapped—”These birds, they could’ve...they couldn’t have left the island, Aziraphale they were stuck there. Like fish in a barrel or-or like flightless _birds on an island filled with hunters._ There was nothing, _nothing,_ they could do to help themselves. They couldn’t even fly. They didn’t even know why they were being punished they just were. Like the Flood, like Isaac, like the stars. Don’t get me _started_ on the stars they keep just—they keep falling and I put them there and I should know when they fall but I don’t because I have no—” 

Slowly, Aziraphale reached out, loose fingers wrapping around Crowley’s bony wrist. His words caught in his throat, floundering and dying there, burning up in the atmosphere like he ought to have. 

“Dear,” Aziraphale whispered, giving the faintest tug and Crowley tumbled forward with all the weight of six thousand years of hopelessness and emptiness. Aziraphale caught him as he fell, wrapping him in blazing white wings. 

For a moment, a sickening, terrible moment, Crowley wondered what it might’ve been like had Aziraphale been there at that moment. If he’d have caught him then. “So I can’t love you,” Aziraphale whispered into the shock of copper hair. “Because of doves, and stars?”

Crowley buried his nose in Aziraphale’s neck. “No.”

“No I can’t, or no that’s not what you meant?” He asked, breath hot, searing, against his skin. Crowley pressed closer, closer, hoping he could meld his body to Aziraphale’s and stop thinking, stop wondering, stop worrying and just _be._ Be closer, be together, be happy. Fuck, he should be happy—he should be so damned happy. 

This was his happy ending, wasn’t it? What he thought about when he was alone, daring to cling to some ghost of a dream that one day, possibly, against all conceivable odds Aziraphale might, _might,_ love him back. 

And now he had it and he wasn’t even sure what to _do_ with it. 

He was a demon, afterall, he wasn’t supposed to be happy. He sniffed and pulled back, not the sort of _I-don’t-want-to-discuss-my-feelings_ sniff. This one was wetter, stickier. 

“It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” He asked, poking his tongue into his cheek. “I’m being ridiculous. Mourning stars that keep falling and birds that went and got themselves all hunted out. Ridiculous, really,” he huffed, squeezing his eyes shut as he stepped out of Aziraphale’s embrace. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Sorry about that, angel. Won’t happen again.” 

“Will you at least tell me what you were on about? I’m a bit,” Aziraphale flickered his eyes, a flickering blue-white, towards the door. Out past it, towards the cliffside. “Worried.” 

“Don’t be.” Another sniff, this one was one of the proper ones though. “I’ve just been thinking. About things.”

“Flightless doves and stars?”

Made perfect sense to him. “Yeah.” 

“You know, normally, I find the whole thing a bit tedious and have no Earthly idea why you do it so frequently but,” Aziraphale’s tongue darted out over his lips, his fingers toying with his pinky ring. “I think maybe you ought to go to bed.” 

The weight of his useless wings hung heavy from his shoulders, dragging him down with them as he slumped, immediately exhausted. “Right, no, yeah, you’re right. Absolutely,” he said, choking up some sort of agreement from deep in the caverns of his lungs. “I need to just...get some sleep.” A fold and a twitch and his wings were right back where they belonged, hidden out of sight, out of where anyone could see them. 

Except Aziraphale of course, if he squinted. 

He turned, abrupt, on a heel and headed back to the bedroom. Sleep. He needed sleep, that’s what was wrong with him. Hadn’t had a good reset in a while. He needed to sleep for a day, a night, a month, whatever. He needed sleep. A good, long, proper, sleep. Aziraphale’s shadow hovered in the doorway, having followed Crowley, bobbing nervously behind him the whole way. 

“Unless of course,” Aziraphale tried, “you’d like to talk about it.”

“That is,” Crowley said, flashing a hand down himself to strip entirely. They’d discussed it, well Crowley tried at least. He tried and he came very, very, near the edge of everything. Of admitting everything he’d been thinking for the past six thousand and one years and it was all too much. Too much and he couldn’t control it and Aziraphale didn’t understand it. “The last thing I want to do.”

Not that the angel ever could, he was still, after all, an angel. The insistent hover, however, stuck around, the gently pulsating roll of Ethereal Energy crawling at the edge of Crowley’s mind as he tipped himself into the bed.

They were champions at not talking about things. Really class acts at ignoring whatever they shouldn’t be ignoring. They ignore the idea of talking about their feelings for six thousand years—what’s another night between celestial-infernal beings? Nothing at all. Aziraphale hovered, still, around the door, slipping into the room as Crowley slid into bed. 

“Really, angel,” he said, settling himself between the sheets. “Nothing to talk about.”

Nothing at all. 

He ignored Aziraphale all the way until he fell asleep. 

Demons, in general, weren’t ever capable of dreaming. For a few reasons. Firstly, dreaming required sleeping and Crowley was one of a scant few demons who ever slept. Secondly, it required a very hefty amount of imagination. Something Crowley had in abundance. 

That night, he dreamed he was back on Saint Helena, impossibly low to the ground. His serpentine body slithered through the underbrush, around the nonplussed birds that watched him. Unafraid of the snake, the predator that could swallow them whole. A thick line of black cutting through the dusty browns and withering greens, Crowley twisted and made his way around this little flock, circling them and hissing as one tried to move to far away from his sight. 

He wasn’t sure why he had to keep them contained but he did, he had to keep these birds within his grasp. They were stuck there together, a flightless snake and flightless birds. 

It felt like hours, days, nothing but constant circling, monitoring, watching, a growing sense of desperation gnawing low in his stomach. Snakes couldn’t panic, they couldn’t. They couldn’t burst at the seams with an indescribable anxiety and fear of something entirely unknown and unrecognized. 

That’s the whole reason he picked _snake._ Other demons wanted lizards and flies and sharks and sea urchins. Sharp things with spines and claws and burning rage in their eyes. Snakes were alone, coiled in the darkness, cold and just _there._

Any Herpetologists worth their salt will tell you that snakes are biologically incapable of feeling love. 

They could recognize the hands that feed them, learn to slink around their wrists and up their arms without squeezing. Without biting. They could learn safety and comfort instead of trepidation and fear. 

But they are incapable on a primal, instinctual, level of love. 

He watched, helplessly, as the little things stuck like him spread their wings and one by one took off until he was alone. Snakes were incapable of love. Nothing could hurt you if you refused to let it. The last bird turned, shook out his feathers and hopped, watching Crowley with emotionless, empty eyes. 

It stretched, wings full and ready and Crowley knew, he _knew,_ this one could fly. Like it others. It would spread its wings and take off, fully aware of what he was. Dangerous, poisonous, something that should be fundamentally incapable of love but can’t seem to stop itself, even to protect itself. 

It watched him, as if asking why he wasn’t following, why wouldn’t spread those midnight wings and follow them. Then it left too. 

Crowley woke up without so much as his limbs twisted around Aziraphale, but one long continuous body coiled around him. Constricting him.

Yellow eyes blinked. A jaw-unhinging yawn soon following. A warm hand smoothed down the back of his cool body, following the line of jet-ink scales. “Happened sometime in the night,” Aziraphale told him, hand coming to rest somewhere low on Crowley’s body, cupping where he coiled over himself loose on Aziraphale’s stomach. 

It was still dark out, suggesting Crowley had either slept an entire day, or not very long at all. Given how unsteady he felt, he was feeling it might have been more the latter.

 _Ah,_ he thought. It made sense. Dream you’re a snake, become a snake. He wasn’t sure why, but he fully and genuinely thought he would wake up alone. Empty half of the bed, Aziraphale off doing something, secluded away in his library with his books or off bopping about town in search of some new thing or just time to kill. 

Anything but just lying there, watching Crowley sleep. 

A blink and Crowley was back, Aziraphale’s hand migrating up to his back while Crowley buried his nose in Aziraphale's silk pajama top. Sky blue, smooth, wonderful to the touch. 

“Feeling better, are we?” Aziraphale asked, rubbing warm circles up and down the line of scales that meandered down Crowley’s spine. They looked a bit like a snake, if he’d moved enough. It was one of those things if he thought hard about it, he could fix, he could make them meld back into his skin and pretend, just _pretend,_ like he was something he wasn’t. 

“Yeah,” he lied. Two in as many days. In for a penny, he supposed. “Feeling much better.” That dove kept staring at him every time he blinked, replaying that moment right before liftoff on the back of his eyelids. It wanted him to follow it, wanted him to sprout wings and keep going, to follow it where Crowley could _never_ go. 

_Wherever you are, I’ll come to you._

The words struck him with the violent force of a hurricane, wrenching him up away from Aziraphale’s warm body and tumbling him right back into the thick of everything he’d been feeling since he stood on the brink of the cliff and tried to feel whole again. It wrenched around in his chest, yanking and tugging and rising a sick-golden bile to the back of his throat. 

He would never be forgiven; he could _never_ follow Aziraphale if he wanted to go. 

Crowley squeezed his eyes shut. _The doves._ He could never follow _the doves._

“Dear,” Aziraphale said and Crowley could _feel_ the pinch of his lips and the scrunch of his nose even if he couldn’t see them. It was all there, a quiet, but righteous, frustration painted right across the angels face. “Did you just lie to me?” 

“No.” Three lies, two days. Crowley apparently was making up for lost time. “Well,” he scrubbed at his eyes, “a bit.”

The sigh behind him was incredibly nearly angry. “Crowley—”

“I’m a demon, right, Aziraphale? It’s what I do, I lie,” he didn’t so much _re-dress_ as he stood up, fully dressed once more. He cracked his neck at the effort, shaking out limbs that weren’t pleased to be limbs again. They wanted to meld together, stop having this conversation, and just be a snake again. Took a bit too much concentration to get his sunglasses onto his face.

“Not to me you don’t.” It was the prim clipped tone that let Crowley know that Aziraphale was upset with him. That was fine, Crowley could handle when Aziraphale was upset with him, it was easier to understand his rage than it was to comprehend his love. “I don’t see why you won’t just tell me what’s wrong.”

Crowley circled the bed, already heading towards the door. “I did. Last night. Told you all of it, every last bit. There’s not much too it, Aziraphale.” 

“Last night,” Aziraphale snipped, the bedroom door snapping shut just as Crowley reached for it. His skin twitched and he hated it. He wanted to be alone, he _needed_ to be alone. Somewhere without the buzz of Aziraphale behind him. Somewhere alone, somewhere he could burrow deep into the ground and slink into the cool grass and just—be. Somewhere without birds, somewhere without stars, somewhere without love. 

Crowley held his hands up, “Last night. We had a whole conversation about you, you told me to go to bed, I did. Again, Aziraphale, it’s fine—it was fine last night, it’s fine now.” 

“Last night you told me that I couldn’t love you.” 

Did he now? Crowley grimaced, finally turning on his snake-skin heels. “I was in a bit of a state.”

“Oh really? I couldn’t tell.” Bastard. Aziraphale stood, not changing or summoning his clothing. His frustration leaked over with a lingering glow, a twist of fire wisping with the curls behind his ears and the blue of his eyes burning out to a furiously worried white. “You go up to the roof, you leap about trees, you stand at the edge of rooftops—really, Crowley, I tend to consider myself quite the intelligent being. It doesn’t take an angel to realize what you’ve been trying to do and while I have no _Earthly_ idea why you’ve been trying to—to fly when you know _damned_ well that you can’t, that will not stop me from being concerned about you. You’re going to get yourself hurt, actually not — no you’ve already gone and got yourself hurt.” 

Barely. Crowley’s teeth set on edge, his hackles rising with the smoke and steam that rolled off his skin. “You’ve got no right, angel,” his voice was low, a dangerous sort of croon that he’d never used against Aziraphale before. 

Of course, the expanding and consuming being of Light and Love before him didn’t so much as balk. “I _do,_ as your—as someone who loves you, _deeply,_ Crowley. I have every right to worry, every right to be furious with you.”

“It’s _that,”_ he snapped, hissing over his s’s like the damned snake he is. “That love—you shouldn’t love me, you _can't_ love me.” 

Aziraphale’s response came properly testy. “Because of doves and stars, yes, I remember.” 

“Because _She doesn’t.”_

“What She—” A flicker, eyes up. “Does or does not do has no impact on how I feel, Crowley. And I think it best if you stop trying to tell me what I can or cannot do. I don’t care about doves, or stars or what…or what anyone thinks of you. Whichever one of our former sides. I love you, and I will keep loving you regardless.” 

When Crowley looked back over, the raw Celestial energy was gone, leaving just Aziraphale, looking as he ever does. But with significantly wetter eyes. “She decided, Aziraphale.”

“A long time ago,” he tried, and Crowley watches as he stepped forward, gripping at a blackened, scaled, wrist. “Haven’t you ever considered this forgiveness?”

“Forgiveness?” Crowley should have wrenched his arm away. He should have been furious, enraged, at the idea of Aziraphale talking forgiveness again. Another bit of evidence that that was all he was after. The savior, the fixer. “I’m—”

“So you’ve said,” Aziraphale’s voice was louder, firmer than the trembling mess that was Crowley’s. “You’re unforgivable, you’re unlovable, I’ve heard every iteration of it and it is _exhausting._ I have spent thousands of years forgiving you and thousands of years loving you.” And there it went, crumbling around the edges and Crowley could feel his chest beginning to shatter, out of it oozing white-grey feathers and stars as Aziraphale’s voice cracked. “And I know it’s not enough—”

“Don’t say that.” The voice was Crowley’s, the words was Crowley’s but he didn’t remember saying it. “Don’t—Aziraphale.” He worked on muscle memory, on buried instincts that clawed their up from the surface and coiled around his arms, bringing Aziraphale against his chest, a pale hand burying in the soft wintery curls. The tried to swallow the guilt and shame that infested him, that clawed and consumed him. Maybe if he were a better—a _worse—_ demon he would’ve bothered to consider something like how this momentous breakdown would affect Aziraphale. The face against his chest sniffed, wet and upset. 

Crowley breathed him in, for just a moment. “You are so much enough,” he told him, iron-band arms holding him firmly in place, even as Aziraphale wriggled for a better positioning, his own limbs anchoring them together. “I don’t know—I don’t know _how_ to…” To feel it, to let himself know and be known. To break open the spots that hurt, that ache, and smoulder and put them in someone else's hands again.

To sit on an island and watch the birds, to love something the way he loved the stars. 

To be loved without the paralyzing fear of being broken and burned once more. 

He carefully detangled his arms from around Aziraphale, taking his face in his hands with a reverent, loving, grace not often found outside of cathedrals with wine-stained lips. “I love you,” he told him, because he certainly felt Aziraphale might have been needing the reminder. “I don’t know how to let you, angel.” 

Another sniff, and Aziraphale leaned in, the kiss tasting far too much like salt for Crowley’s tastes. “I suppose just letting me is off the table.”

“I think so.” It tasted like _I’m sorry._ Crowley tried not to think too hard on it. For a moment he felt like he might’ve been falling, stomach bottoming out and fingers shaking where they keep stroking through Aziraphale’s hair, mussing up his curls with reckless abandon. Like they were back on the cliffside but instead of just him it was them, and he didn’t want to step out over the edge. Because at the bottom it wasn’t sand and rock and birds and stars and the churn of an upset ocean. 

At the bottom was the all-consuming knowledge that if he wanted to, Aziraphale could let go. 

For a moment, for one terrifying, agonizing, moment, Crowley thought he was going to. Aziraphale’s grip slackened, his hands slid down to the front of Crowley’s shirt—but he didn’t let go. He gripped the front of his shirt instead, balling the fabric there and holding him firm and steady. “I suppose we’ll just have to practice. You said something about stars, didn’t you?”

That they fall, they burn up and out and—”Yeah.” Maybe that train of thought wasn’t productive. Aziraphale’s lips split into something almost resembling genuine, happiness. 

“Could we go watch them? Dawn won’t come for a few more hours, and it’s late enough that I think everyone ought to be asleep.” 

Slowly, like all the tentative gracelessness of a newborn bird, Crowley agreed. Aziraphale dressed properly, despite the fact that no one would see them, and reached out, taking Crowley’s hand as he walked them back through the grass, over the rocky terrain, all along the short, brisk, walk up to the cliff where he’d found him the day before. Aziraphale sat near the edge, legs crossed. 

Crowley joined him, turning his face back up to the stars. “I’ll take it you’re the artist who formed the constellations,” Azirphale asked, their knees bumping together, his hand seeking Crowley’s. 

“No,” he admitted, eyes following invisible lines he memorized ages ago. “Humans did that, really. I just sort of threw them up there, couldn’t see the spaces between them. At least not from Earth. Humans looked up and saw crabs and people and bears. And soup ladles.”

“Brilliant things, aren’t they?” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley didn’t have to look away from the stars to feel the burn of Aziraphale’s gaze over his skin. 

He blinked up, waiting for a star to fall. None did, they all clung there, hopeful and gleaming back down at him. There was a moment, a steadying, long, moment, before he let his Essence stretch just a bit out past his body, a shudder if displaced air as wings stretched out behind him. 

Aziraphale glanced, but didn’t move otherwise—except to give Crowley’s hand another lingering squeeze. “They saw the things you made, looked up at the stars and decided it was art.”

Crowley’s fingers moved over Aziraphale’s hand slowly, each pulse in his veins and constriction and contraction of muscle leading into an incredibly deliberate move until he was cupping the back of his hand, carefully lifting and guiding Aziraphale’s palm to the sensitive underside of his wing. 

Broken, useless wings. Aziraphale’s fingers carded through his feathers, reaching up and leaning against his shoulder. “Which one was your favorite?” He asked, as Crowley really, really tried to fight down the urge to clamp his wings shut and bolt—to curl down over himself and stop it, just _stop it._

Every moment, every breath, every softly-pulsating roll of heat and Love off Aziraphale made it just that much more bearable. Until the fingers were soothing instead of threatening. “I don’t have one,” Crowley admitted. “I loved all of them.” 

Slowly, Aziraphale’s face moved, until his lips found the skin under Crowley’s ear, the side of his cheek, his jaw, all the places he could reach from there, before twisting up to press his lips to the ridge of his wing and oh—oh. Crowley gasped, a wet, frightful sound. 

“Is that alright?” Another kiss, a curl of his fingers against his wing. Places Crowley had never been touched by another soul, another being. 

He whimpered out something that might’ve been an affirmative as Aziraphale pulled himself up and around, settling into Crowley’s lap and using both hands now to stroke through his feathers, to touch his wings. 

To leverage himself as he pulled down, lips pressed to the feathers and muscles and bones that betrayed him (or that Crowley betrayed, he didn’t know anymore, who hurt who, who started what). It made his chest ache, the cold wasteland that roared and throbbed and gaped inside himself _burn._ Like setting fire to a long-dead forest, Aziraphale’s fingers and lips over the most well-hidden, well-exposed, parts of himself consumed him. 

The nothingness inside him swelled, the empty void twisting over itself again and again and again with every pass of fingers and ever press of warm-Loving lips. It felt like when they’d mingled their Essences, when Aziraphale pushed so much Love into him that he thought he was going to shatter and break, but they were nearly fully corporeal still. 

This seeped into his bones, it roared in his blood which roared in his ears which turned to gas and stoked the flames that Aziraphale had very much lit. 

By the time Aziraphale rocked down against him, his nose buried in the upper joint of his wing, Crowley was a proper mess, head thrown back half-lidded eyes watching the blurry stars tremble above him. 

“My dear,” Aziraphale crooned, pulling back and looking at him, unabashed in his Loving and Longing and Wanting, so bare, so open, so exposed that Crowley wanted to look away. He wanted to hide and shy from the expression, from the embrace, from the _trust._ “Let me love you?” 

The echo was pointed, but Crowley could taste the implication, the innuendo that wrapped just enough around it to draw his attention away from the subtext. His fingers went for the buttons of his waistcoat, delicately and carefully stripping away his angels clothing—with all the attentive reverence of worshipers on their knees taking wine and flesh.

If Crowley hadn’t already been cast out, surely idolatry would be his sin. He stripped Aziraphale like he worshiped him. He had all he needed before him, all he needed was there as he rolled Aziraphale onto his back and hovering over him, pressing lips to skin to skin to skin, everywhere he could manage as he settled, bare, between two pale thighs. 

Lost in him, Crowley leaned down for another, kiss, pressing himself against Aziraphale’s body. He kept them locked, kept them sealed together—the edges of their Essences mingling as they interlocked effortlessly. Crowley pushed and Aziraphale yielded with—as Crowley only realized in that moment—an inordinate amount of trust and love and want. 

Crowley sunk into the (his) angel, black wings stretched out behind himself, seeking the cool pressure of the wind and the effortless touch of the night. He shivered, shuddered, as he rolled into him again and again and again, the hot grasp of Aziraphale’s body crawling entirely over him, worse than the flames and fires of anything else.

He let Aziraphale grasp, let him grab and touch the length of his wings, let him _feel_ the parts of Crowley that he’d spent so long trying not to feel. The only time he stopped kissing him, stopped tasting the holy-tingle of Love off Aziraphale’s tongue, was when it became too much. When all he could was pant, hot and wet and so desperately, foolishly, in love against him. 

Aziraphale’s fingers curled around the place where Crowley’s wing joined to his back, the spot he’d wondered a million times over why God didn’t just set her Foot there and snap. He held onto Crowley, anchored them together as he shuddered and shivered and whimpered his way through his completion. Crowley couldn’t withhold much longer beyond that, spilling into Aziraphale’s body and pressing as deep as he could go, refusing to part from him. 

He couldn’t, he couldn’t slide out, couldn’t stop touching him. Aziraphale leaned up, sliding their lips together in and effortless facsimile of a kiss. Something close, something very nearly better. His wings spread and Crowley couldn’t feel the ground beneath them, he couldn’t feel anything but Aziraphale and the air and the wind.

For a moment, loving felt like falling which felt like flying.

For another moment, he lingered there, thinking of nothing but the sensation of wind and air and Aziraphale. No doves, no stars, no fire, or pain. 

Just this. 

It took a long while for him to part from Aziraphale, to detangle themselves in the physical and Celestial sense. Dawn was breaking over the horizon, a promising glow of another day, and another to come after, and another to come after that. 

Crowley poured himself into the grass beside his angel, one wing bending to not swat at him by mistake. “Well,” he said, eyes drifting shut as he caught the breath he didn’t need to be catching. “That was something.” 

“It was,” Aziraphale replied, the grass rustling beneath him as he rolled onto his side. “I know that doesn’t fix anything but, I feel like it was a step in the right direction. Or at least not further away.”

Crowley’s mouth opened, but no words came. He closed it again, for a long while, thinking, for one of the first times, very carefully about what he wanted to say. “I think it was. I upset you earlier and I’m sorry.” Sorry. It came more frequently in the past year. Though perhaps not frequently enough, Crowley worried. 

“Aziraphale, what if one day you are going to realize that I will always be what I am and you will always be what you are. She decided She couldn’t love me anymore. She was made of love, She made me with Her love and decided that I didn’t deserve it.” 

Aziraphale moved closer, stroking down Crowley’s cheek. “It is rather unfortunate, Crowley, but you have been a constant by my side for six thousand years, and it will take much _much_ more than...uncertainty to cause me to spend one single additional year without you. I have no intention of going _anywhere_ that you cannot follow me, dear boy. You are my confidant, my best friend, my lover, my...husband.

I love you, Crowley, and I will love you for as long as it takes for you to accept that, and for every moment afterwards. Whether or not you think you are worthy, or that you deserve my love—nothing will ever stop me.”

Demons don’t cry. They certainly don’t hunch forward, wrapping their arms around angels and let themselves, for just a moment—as the morning birds swoop and the stars slowly retreat back from the harsh realities of daylight—let themselves feel the edges of Love burning against them. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [Tumblr](https://crowzi.tumblr.com/) mostly reblogging shit

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] saint helena doves and other flightless birds](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20113321) by [burnhamofvulcan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/burnhamofvulcan/pseuds/burnhamofvulcan)




End file.
